In a large-scale facility such as a business place, a commercial facility, and a public facility, it is required that an unspecified large number of people who are left behind in the facility are guided to evacuate to an outside of the facility safely, reliably, and rapidly at occurrence of a state of emergency such as a fire, an earthquake, and terrorism. A firefighter, a police officer, and the like have been using a method of providing an evacuation method to an evacuee by using a speaker. However, there is a limit to an instruction from a firefighter in a large-scale facility. Further, a guide like the firefighter may meet with a secondary disaster. Thus, an evacuation guidance system without depending on an instruction from a person is proposed.
NPL 1 discloses an automated evacuation guidance system. In NPL 1, an optimum evacuation route according to a place where a fire starts is set in advance, and the set evacuation route is used as a guidance route in an emergency. In the system in NPL 1, a distribution of people left behind in a facility is assumed, and a guidance route is derived by a simulation in advance. Thus, in a technique of NPL 1, evacuation guidance may not be appropriately performed when a situation that is not assumed in the simulation occurs in an emergency.
A mental state of a person in an emergency is greatly different from that in a normal condition. For example, not a few people may try to find an evacuation direction and wander without knowing which direction an emergency exit is located in, may be petrified due to a mental shock without knowing what to do, and may become stupefied and squat down. People in such a mental state are more likely to fail to escape. Thus, people in various mental states need to be appropriately guided to an outside of a facility in an emergency. In order to guide people who are left behind in a facility to an outside of the facility without missing anybody, a location in the facility and a state of each person need to be found out.
PTL 1 discloses a method of detecting, by a sensor, a situation of a disaster in a facility at occurrence of the disaster in a power plant, a factory, or the like, and safely guiding an evacuee to evacuate. In the method of PTL 1, a situation of a disaster is detected by the sensor, a disaster area and a location of a person are also determined, and an optimum route searched and determined from a list of evacuation guidance routes stored previously is notified to the evacuee. In the technique of PTL 1, a location of a person is checked with an access monitoring sensor or a surveillance camera, a person who goes in and out of a facility is monitored, and an evacuation situation is determined.
PTL 2 discloses an evacuation guidance system using a wireless sensor network. In the system of PTL 2, a wireless sensor network disposed in a distributed manner in a facility is controlled by a centralized management method, and presence or absence of a person and a degree of congestion are determined by a human detection sensor installed in each place of the facility. A human detection sensor using a pyroelectric infrared ray sensor is able to detect a subject by acquiring a temporal change in temperature. Further, a human detection sensor using an ultrasonic sensor is able to determine the presence of a subject by measuring a distance between the sensor and the subject from reciprocating time in which ultrasonic waves emitted from the sensor are reflected by the subject and return.
Further, PTL 3 and NPL 2 also disclose an evacuation guidance system by a distributed method using a wireless sensor network. In the systems of PTL 3 and NPL 2, an evacuation guidance device installed in a distributed manner in a facility operates in a coordinated fashion by wireless communication. An example of using a crowd density sensor as a means of determining movement of people in the systems of PTL 3 and NPL 2 is disclosed.
Further, NPL 3 discloses an evacuation guidance method of measuring an evacuation action by using classification of actions of people, and determining a tendency of an evacuation action. In NPL 3, when a movement destination for going to a destination or a way point is determined, an action of a person is specifically measured by a stereo camera or a laser range scanner. On the other hand, when a route or a way point to a destination is determined or a destination is determined, movement of a person is measured by a measurement system with a monocular camera or manual work.
In a case of presence of an unspecified large number of evacuees in a large-scale facility, an appropriate evacuation route may not be found because the evacuees are unfamiliar with the place or psychologically disturbed. NPL 4 and NPL 5 disclose a system for actively guiding an evacuee to an emergency exit by a flashing light and preceding sound.